Friday, May 6, 2011

More on the KJV

A friend highly recommends KJB: The Book That Changed the World, a documentary about the historical, and particularly the political, circumstances surrounding the creation of the King James Version. It is narrated by John Rhys-Davies, the actor who played Gimli in the films of Lord of the Rings. In an interview also on the disc Rhys-Davies comments that "It's a special Bible, written at a special time, a time when the language was actually molten, when language could have gone any way... they shaped it thus."

C.S. Lewis...argued against the notion of the Bible as literature. "I cannot help suspecting . . . that those who read the Bible as literature do not read the Bible," he said.

The Bible is primarily the story of man's sin and God's work of redemption, and no version has put that story in such compelling prose as the KJV. The days of the KJV's dominance are gone, but in the Bible's most famous verses, its cadences reverberate. As John 3:16 says in the King James, "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life." That still sounds like the Bible to me.

Standfast:

[Honest said] "I thought we had an honest man upon the road...."
"If you thought not amiss," said Standfast, "how happy am I! But if I be not as I should, ‘tis I alone must bear it."(John Bunyan, Pilgrim's Progress)